There are calculations to show that we can reduce levels of carbon emissions in the future, and one can only hope methods will be found which will be capable of implementing some of these options. The costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol realistically are estimated at approximately 0.1% of GDP for each participating country. These figures are huge, and there’s no doubt we’re talking about a massive economic resource dedicated to a very specific problem.

We need people to grow up and begin to use their brains; if the planet cannot sustain human life because its atmosphere is polluted beyond use, or our environment becomes too hot to inhabit, then making and selling vitamin pills and flu vaccines, or arming our neighbours to kill each other, become somewhat superfluous considerations. We’re not talking about thousands or even millions of people here, we’re talking about many billions of people, all of us: the entire human race. The sense of commitment to serious issues affecting our lives today, and the lives of our children in the future, appears to be absent. We are more concerned with short-term revenue than with long-term survival. What does that tell us about ourselves? These facts are why so many people take to the road with their bicycles and cycle naked around the city, to bring this information to our attention.

Even though precise figures, long term plans and general policies can be debated – for there are surely arguments for and against the prioritization of one perceived danger over another, with both economical and practical considerations – there are still clearly large numbers of people suffering and dying every day from car-related, airborne particulates and oil-based pollutants, as well as from traffic accidents whether driving, walking or cycling. It is clear that with figures like these one has to wonder whether politicians, and authorities such as the police, are being disingenuous when they declare a need to crack down on, for instance, marijuana (with zero deaths per year, as confirmed by medical journals), while they ignore the dangerous pollutants all around us and the many thousands of deaths worldwide each and every single day. The mind really boggles at the apparently unequal importance of various issues when one just takes a minute to consider their relative value according to this simple ‘show me the numbers’ rule.

Marijuana deaths = 0 per year, oil based extraction and usage deaths = 170,000+ per year, alcohol related deaths = 250,000+ per year. With figures like these, one could be forgiven for wondering what the problem is with marijuana or nudity, when the numbers so clearly demonstrate otherwise, and it seems certain that outdated fundamentalist religious morals play a large role in that answer. Perhaps, as any serious financier might do, when faced with questions of what we permit the government to spend our tax money on, we just need to pull out a calculator ourselves.